Ten things that you didn’t know about Roe v Wade

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“Jane Roe” was no angel: The woman in the case, Norma Corvey, had been in and out of prison and had already had two children before she was twenty. She was, in her own words “unemployable and depressed”, and when she got pregnant for the third time, she didn’t want the child.

By hook or by crook: At the time, the law in Texas prohibited abortions. She was advised by friends to file a false rape accusation, which she did. The accusation was (rightly) dismissed because she didn’t report the rape to the police at the time. When that didn’t work, she tried to get an illegal abortion, only to find that the clinics near her had been closed down by law enforcement. In desperation, she found a pair of female lawyers who took the case all the way to the Supreme Court.

The case was moot: Norma never had an abortion.The child who triggered the case was put up for adoption.

Roe v Wade was never about “Women’s rights”: The case was heard by the Supreme Court as a privacy issue, not as an abortion issue. The case was fought primarily as a right for physicians to practice medicine freely and with a minimum of federal oversight

The right to life is important: In its ruling, The Supreme Court found that the state’s duty to protect life outweighed the mother’s privacy rights at the point where the fetus was viable. In the 70s, viability was about six months. Today it is abut four. When artificial womb technology becomes available, that will effectively drop to zero, at which point viability will, at least theoretically, trump abortion.

The case was not fought on the morality of abortion: One of the arguments was whether consent to sex equaled consent to parenthood. The court rightly found no such equality.

The trimester model: A woman had the right to an abortion during the first trimester. During the third Trimester, the fetus was viable, and abortion would therefore be murder. the “trimester model” was dismantled in subsequent Supreme Court cases.

It is Constitutional. Sort of…: In its majority finding, The Court deemed abortion a fundamental right under the United States Constitution… even though there is nothing in the constitution that deals directly with the matter. Legitimizing abortion is “a matter of privacy” is a joke, as it does not supersede the “right to life” enshrined in the Declaration of Independence.

Roe Repented: Norma Corvey subsequently regretted her actions and the landmark case which bears her name. She went on to become a pro-life advocate. Before she died, she created a website called www.endroe.org.